READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Posts

Kenko and the many meanings of his Tsure-Zure Gusa

At this year’s St Peter’s Book Fair in September, in Melbourne, amidst a table of turned-up spines: one small tattered green book, art nouveau decorations in gold on cover. Title page: ‘The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest : Being a Translation of Tsure-Zure Gusa by William N. Porter’, with an Introduction by Sanki Ichikawa. (London : Humphrey Milford, 1914) Only on page 4 of the Introduction, hidden in a paragraph, is the actual name of the author disclosed, “a fourteenth-century priest named Kenko, who lived the life of a recluse, without being able entirely to forgo the passions and desires of this world.” Hidden in his own book. Why William N. Porter prints his name and the name of Sanki Ichikawa on the title page, but not the name of Urabe Kenko (1283-1350), also known as Yoshida Kenko, or simply Kenko, is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps short essays on the conjectures are in order. Publishing sales. English manners. Self-importerance. The ...

George Herbert's Country Parson

Report on a lecture given at Trinity College, Parkville on the 12 th of August and reflections from Philip Harvey, for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne Last Tuesday Susan Bell, Bishop of Niagara, gave the Barry Marshall Lecture in Melbourne on the priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Priest and poet are roles inextricably bound together in the person of Herbert, something she painfully (in the early modern sense of ‘going to pains’) described. She remarked that “all his writing is about vocation to Christianity.” Son of one of the leading families of the realm, u niversity orator, courtier and diplomat, he was “a man on the way up when it all came to a screeching halt.” Herbert decided to enter holy orders, possibly due to health. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, went to work in the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where presently he died, probably of consumption. His poetry, Bishop Bell called it “winsome”...

Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity DIARMAID MACCULLOCH

‘Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, published by Allen Lane, 2024. This review first appeared in the patronal issue of The Parish Paper at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, June 2025. Anyone familiar with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s breadth and depth of research and his powers of synthesis is inspired anew by his latest big-picture history of Christianity. His confessed purpose is to unsettle settled ideas. Indeed, when it comes to his chosen subject of sex, the reader must reconsider all manner of lifetime assumptions, left wondering what conclusions can be drawn. Just two assumptions are enough for starters. 1. There have always been church weddings. This assumption is flatly disproven by MacCulloch. The church in early centuries had remarkably little to do with the ceremonies of marriage, a fact supported by a complete lack of any liturgical evidence. Blessings of marriag...

Circe’s Carnival of Vice BLOOMSDAY IN MELBOURNE 2025

Photographs of the show by Jody Jane Stitt fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne Review by Philip Harvey The nighttown episode of Ulysses, set in the red-light district of Dublin, invites the reader by every imaginable literary trick or treat to experience both the strange otherworld of the Hibernian Metropolis and the inexplicable creations of the individual unconscious. In his schema for the novel, James Joyce prescribed the creative technique ‘hallucination’ for this episode. Hallucination is an abiding form of character presentation (both animate and inanimate characters) throughout. It is also, in Flaubertian manner, an effect whereby Joyce would induce, seduce and influence the sensitive reader. But how do you make hallucination happen onstage? One answer is in this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne production. The collective obsession of the scriptwriters for this episode, the longest in the novel, has prompted all their best and worst instinc...

Learning to Read the Templum REVIEW OF TWO bOOKS BY KEVIN HART

Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin. Kevin Hart ‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of contemplation’ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023 ‘Dark-Land : memoir of a secret childhood’ Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024 I The copious, sprawling, adventurous Gifford lectures found in Kevin Hart’s ‘Lands of Likeness’ are claimed to be focused in the first instance on contemplation, and then on contemplation and modern poetry. In other words, two of the abiding preoccupations of this author: (1) the primarily religious question of prayer, how we as humans relate to God and the world; and (2) why we turn our language into poetic forms, and why we do that in the context of a world recovering from modernity. However, the lectures chart the altering understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on cultural definitio...

Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Christina Rossetti 1: Emily Brontë (1818-1838)

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) Portrait by Branwell Brontë A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13 th of August 2024. “Darkness was overtraced on every face” Darkness was overtraced on every face Around clouded with storm and ominous gloom In Hut or hall smiled out no resting place There was no resting place but one – the tomb All our hearts were the mansions of distress And no one laughed and none seemed free from care Our children felt their fathers’ wretchedness Our homes one all were shadowed with despair It was not fear that made the land so sad The great majority of poems written by Emily Brontë are short expressions of desire, solitude, separation, isolation, hostility, distress, loss, longing, anguish, tempest, hopelessness, suffering. Readers know about these states of being from her novel. It is no secret ...